Atti, how did you all meet and form a band?

Ettore and I were friends since childhood. We didn’t see each other for a long time and then we met randomly again during a party in the hills out of town. We started to talk and discovered we both loved bands such as Joy Division, Arab Strap, and Mogwai, so we decided the next day that we would buy a synthesizer and start to rehearse in our bedrooms. It was the summer of year 2000 and this is how the band formed!

…and how did you settle upon the name port-royal?

The name came from Ettore’s brother, Michele, who had joined us to play drums. In that period he was studying Blaise Pascal at school and took the name from the abbey where Giansenism grew and the French philosopher lived for a while. It sounded good and we chose it, even if it had no particular meaning to us

Who (or what) inspired you to start making music?

It is difficult to say... Maybe everything that across adolescent years makes you feel sadness and joy at the same time. That is, makes you live - the face of a girl you’ll never see again, the air of the evenings, coming back home during christmas time, the sense of the passing of time, boredom in studying math at school...

(Brett interjecting) Not any particular band then?

No not really. People are often comparing us to Sigur Ros. It is a wonderful compliment, of course, but I don’t think so myself. The first Mogwai album, yes. But Sigur Ros? I really don’t see it.

Your last album Flares was met with almost universal approval from writers, fans, and peer artists alike. Is it an added burden to follow Flares, considering the acclaim for that record?

Maybe a bit... But the truth is that we really didn’t have the time to think about this thing because most of the new songs were created just in the weeks after Flares was released. So we can say that everything originated in a natural way.

Your albums are not short by any means. Being essentially wordless – how difficult is it to keep the music varied over a whole album?

Actually, one of the hardest and most important tasks of an instrumental artist is to pay great attention to details and subtle variations in the songs. In this perspective, our use of the PC is crucial. The computer allows us to work simultaneously on as many as 60 tracks or more just for a single song. Then, considering the best way to use each track, over the course of several months we can slowly reason through the material to decide how to organize the song. Hundreds of possibilities are open and this is a very creative process, which may also include playing a piano or guitar. Anyway, it has to be clear that our music remains essentially a played one, and that this “artifcial” job comes only in a second moment.

You have incorporated vocals into some of the new tracks. An experiment? Or the shape of things to come?

In “Afraid to dance”, there are three short sung moments: at the end of "Deca-dance," in the middle of "Roliga Timmen," and in the first part of "Internet Love." We also have called a friend of ours, Giovanna Gallo, to help us in this job. But this vocal material remains in the background, it is just a detail among many others. The role of vocals is probably becoming more significant in a couple of songs we are working on in this period, but we still don’t know exactly how things will turn out.

Rumours had been rife that the new album ‘Afraid to dance’ would be easier on the guitars if not completely devoid. How accurate were they?

Well, these rumours came directly from us! Actually, compared with “Flares,” the new album is structured more on keyboards than on guitars, and this is a thing we planned after we finished work on Flares. But it doesn’t mean that delayed guitars have disappeared from our compositions! On the contrary, they are still a fundamental ingredient of them.

Why call it ‘Afraid to dance’?

Because every one of us used to feel ashamed when put on the dance floor!

Track 1 is called Bahnhof Zoo. Surely you are mocking U2 here? (Their Achtung Baby begins with a song called ‘Zoo Station’ and Bahnhof is German for Station) So be honest, is this your little joke?

No! This title has a different origin, no joke at all! Honestly, I have never thought about U2’s song! The track was originally written during the summer of 1999 when I was reading the book “Wir die Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo,” the autobiography of the junkie girl from Berlin, Christiane F. That book touched me, so I dedicated that song to Christian. The dark mood of the book is represented well in the track, in my opinion, capturing the nights in the Berlin central station during the end of the ’70s and the beginning of the ’80  It's strange that we recorded that song only in 2006!

So did you deliberately set out in a new direction on Afraid To Dance?

This is not completely true, of course. At the time we felt the need to write some new songs in which we could use larger and different rhythms and electronic components; also, we wanted to sound a little bit more concise. But we knew that the new material would still  be close to “Flares,” because of the sense of melody and melancholy we wanted to maintain and the use of keyboards and delayed guitars we have always done. So, we can say that Afraid To Dance represents an evolution in style and way of composition without going too far from our past, and this is definitively what we wanted to accomplish. On the other hand, it has to be said that in recording an album, casualness plays a very important role and not everything can be planned. A lot of ideas come out all of the sudden in a really surprising way, and it’s a good thing to always let this kind of things happen.

And are you happy with the way it turned out?

Absolutely! We think it’s an (almost) perfect balance between tradition and newness in port-royal art, that mixes danceable parts with ambient atmospheres, melancholy with fun (maybe...), minimalism with depth of sound. We really hope that our fans will appreciate this.

Can you recall your feelings of satisfaction at the same stage after “Flares”? Were they similar?

No, they can’t be the same. “Flares” was our first work to date. (apart from the “Kraken EP”, but that was a different, more domestic, story). It showed us to the world as artists for the first time; what you feel in cases like that in terms of emotion, expectations, fear, satisfaction, everything, cannot be repeated for a second time, absolutely. Anyway we record every album as it could be the last one, trying to reach the best level possible…

How do you write? Is port-royal a democracy? Or is there a Royal leader?

I write most of the melodies from which songs originate, and play most of the instruments in them, but it’s unquestionable that port-royal is a democracy. Our arrangement process is characterized by huge dialectic debates, which can be both decisive and composite. So the contribution of Ettore and Emilio is absolutely vital to arrive to the final result, and this is the one you can hear on record. We are a band. Only together are we port-royal!

Tell us about your new EP.

It is out for Canadian label Chat Blanc and is called “Honved,” from the historical Hungarian football team. It features three new songs by us (one of them written and played together with Italian artist Selaxon Lutberg, except the last part which has been made totally and exclusively by us) and two remixes of “Flares”’ songs: Zobione pt. 1 from Landing and Zobione pt. 2 from Millimetrik, that is Pascal Asselin, the man who owns and runs Chat Blanc.

You’re fairly prominent in the re-mixing arena. Everybody seems to want to get their hands on your stuff or hand their own work over to you. Do you feel part of some kind of global fraternity in this respect?

Actually in these last two years we contacted with many international artists we like (mostly to ask them to remix our songs) and we were positively surprised to discover that often they knew us already and that they liked what we were doing. So from that attempt bore a Flares remixes album which should be out in autumn. Anyway we also made some remixes for good artists as Televise, D_rradio, and Millimetrik, and we have some open collaborations with Absent Without Leave and Strings of Consciousness. But music is not the only field which port-royal found new artist. We've also worked together for one and a half years  with the excellent Roman artist Andrea Dojmi. Together we made the work “Education And Protection Of Our Children #2,” and he made the artwork of our “Afraid To Dance.” We also performed together and we are going to present in the next weeks our “Education…” in Greece. Then other directors are working on some videos for some tracks of “Afraid To Dance.”

(interjecting) I have to ask, what is ‘Education and Protection of our children’? It sounds like a public service film.

‘Education and protection of our children’ is a sort of film in which music and images/themes are totally balanced. You couldn't say which part is prominent, both are  fused together to create a unique mood. For the music we used some tracks from "Flares" ("Education..." was made at the end of 2005) and some tracks that are on "Afraid To Dance." The tracks are different from how they sound on both CDs, especially after being mixed together with the film of Dojmi, and they produce a very nice/strange effect. We are happy with that project... Now we want to do something else with Andrea Dojmi.

Why do electonic/ambient artists get along so well with each other?

I don’t know, maybe it’s because we look at world and life with a similiar sensibility... and we are not such ‘first-women’ as the indie artists! (winks)

“First women”? That’s a new one on me! What is that? Jealous, self-obsessed?

Yes Brett, you understood well. Jealous and self-obsessed as you say. Narcissistic and always ready to talk badly of other people due to the fact they are deeply envious!

The last ‘genre’ I can recall a similar ‘brotherhood’ was ‘Shoegaze’ which also went under the name of ‘the scene that celebrates itself’ due to the constant presence of other band-members at gigs. Is that a good thing or bad thing?

Honestly I don’t know. We tried an experiment (playing together) during a gig in Westmalle (Belgium) with Sasha, bass/cello player from our dear friends Tupolev (a really good band from Vienna we toured together in Slovenia, Austria and Italy) and it was really good. We really like to collaborate with other artist, but the essence of all our works belongs only to port-royal. We compose alone with no interferences form the external world. Then the way of representation is totally another thing.

What of Italy do you bring into your music?

Nothing in particular!

(smiling) Fair enough. What practical difficulties do you face bringing your music into a live show?

When we played as a “real” band, it was difficult to find the right way to bring our songs on a stage, because of all the details and richness of what we had created for Flares. We didn’t like so much the classical “rock” (or post-rock, nothing changes!) way of playing… Now that we present a laptop set with synthesizers and sampler, it is much easier, we just need huge volumes to move and let the audience drown in an ocean of sounds and melodies and – last but not least – we preserve all the details we wanted to have. We also think it’s very important that our performances run together with some visuals; in the last gigs we had throughout Europe, Sieva Diamantakos joined us: he is from Genoa too and has a sensibility really near to ours. Now he is officially a new member of the band!

How is your current European tour going?

Really well! We had great experiences almost everywhere. We are happy to announce that this one was only the 1st phase of a bigger European tour!

And finally what does the future hold for the Royals?

We are planning a summer tour throughout Italy, but we’d like to do some gigs in the States, too, as well as in England... we will see. There are also some dates booked in Poland (summer) and in France (autumn) and maybe even in Turkey (September). We also have almost completed an album of remixes of “Flares,” thanks to the job of some really good artists as U. Schnauss, Judith Juillerat, Manual, S. Hakon, Xela and many others you will soon discover. In the meantime, we are already working hard on the new material for our third record. Five songs are almost ready! Anyway nobody can know what the future holds… We can only make some plans and keep going on with our work.

Thanks to Attilio (interview) and Emilio (beers) and also to Ettore for his invaluable contribution at the start of this interview. Be sure to check out Port Royal on myspace and pick up a copy of Afraid to Dance, available soon!